technology

My son’s eyes light up in anticipation when I open the bottle of soapy water. It’s magic time. As the bubbles float slowly down, he giggles and dances with glee, popping all the bubbles within his reach.

For Shiloh, bubbles are some kind of magic. He has no sense of the scientific concepts that underly bubbles: the surface tension, elasticity, chemistry, light, or even the geometric description of spherical surface area: !

Maybe you get that ‘bubble feeling’ when you get your hands on a new gadget. I’m a bit of a geek, so I flipped out when I tried virtual reality through Google Cardboard for the first time. (Check out the first video I viewed in VR by Vrse.)

The spectacle of a new sphere of experience surrounded my eyes. I recall that famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke:

Like a bubble being blown for my son, the spectacle of a whole new sphere of reality surrounded my eyes. And that app and simple box that wrapped around my iPhone made it possible. Bubbly magic!

Few of us can explain the science of modern machines. The phantasmal magic of tech is becoming ever more complex. While we know how to describe the surface of our user experience, how the magic actually happens,is becoming less and less explainable.

Expect VR to make the mundane a whole lot more fun. That’s my 2¢ on virtual reality.

Once self-copying memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off. – Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Dominic Basulto imagines that digital devices are a kind of primordial soup in which “digital bits” of Big Data will propagate to the point where “they don’t need us anymore.” He speculates upon Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes:

Where things become both exciting and creepy is if the data replicators (data memes) become truly “selfish” and start to challenge the classic genetic replicators (genes). It’s not just that Big Data wants to become Bigger, it’s that it may eventually want to out-compete our genetic material.http://bigthink.com/endless-innovation/big-data-the-new-replicators

An article in EContent Magazine describes of a “proverbial fire hose” that endlessly supplies “junk” data that must be sifted through to discover right, targeted information and relevant intelligence. A report from Basex Research Group is cited, indicating “information overload” is responsible for draining 28% of worker’s time, resulting in an annual productivity loss of “nearly $997 billion”.

We need the capacity to digest and retrieve all this information and we cannot do it alone. It would be useful if the intelligence infrastructure were designed as a game that included “enterprise-ready content curation tools” and machine algorithms that would ensure players effectively “share, collaborate and act upon” gathered intelligence in real-time.

Even if you feel like you’re on top of all your content, chances are that you’ve missed some vital information nuggets. Drinking in all the data from the proverbial fire hose is simply no longer an effective way to consume content.

A recent report from Basex Research Group quantifies this wasted time by estimating that workers lose 28% of their time to information overload. That amounts to nearly $997 billion in annual lost productivity for companies.

CIOs and CTOs are increasingly investigating new process and technology solutions that can mitigate the rising cost and productivity losses associated with data deluge.

It’s not just about the volume of information. It’s about finding the right, targeted information in a sea of “junk” data.

Businesses have just started to realize the importance and benefits of aggregating relevant intelligence.

The next step will be to then offer collaboration capabilities on top of content, which enable users to effectively share, collaborate and act upon the discovered intelligence in real-time.

Content curation, through both machine algorithms and human intervention, will become a major integrated part of the enterprise productivity and intelligence infrastructure.